Situated dialogue systems that interact with humans as part of a team (e.g., robot teammates) need to be able to use information from communication channels to gauge the coordination level and effectiveness of the team. Currently, the feasibility of this end goal is limited by several gaps in both the empirical and computational literature. The purpose of this paper is to address those gaps in ...

Speakers in dialogue tend to adapt to each other by starting to use similar lexical items, syntactic structures, or gestures. This behaviour, called alignment, may serve important cognitive, communicative and social functions (such as speech facilitation, grounding and rapport). Our aim is to enable and study the effects of these subtle aspects of communication in virtual conversational agents....

The coordination is an essential ingredient for the mixed human-agent teamwork. It requires team members to share knowledge to establish common grounding and mutual awareness among them. In this paper, we proposed a collaborative conversational belief-desire-intention (CBDI) behavioural agent architecture that allows to enhance the knowledge sharing using natural language communication between ...

Although the notion of grounding in dialogue is widely acknowledged, the exact nature of the representations of common ground and its specific role in language processing are topics of ongoing debate. Proposals range from rich, explicit representations of common ground in the minds of speakers (Clark, 1996) to implicit representations, or even none at all (Pickering and Garrod, 2004). We argue ...

What the participants share, their common "sense" of the world, creates a foundation, a framing, an orientation that enables human actors to see and act in coordination with one another. For recurrent activities, the methods the participants use to understand each other as they act change, making the intersubjective space in which actors operate richer and easier to produce. This article works ...

Embodied conversational agents should be able to provide feedback on what a human interlocutor is saying. We are compiling a list of facial feedback expressions that signal attention and interest, grounding and attitude. As expressions need to serve many functions at the same time and most of the component signals are ambiguous, it is important to get a better idea of the many to many mappings ...

The paper presents a computational model for a context-dependent analysis of a physical environment in terms of spatial proximity. The model provides a basis for grounding linguistic analyses of spatial expressions in visual perception. The model uses potential fields to model spatial proximity. It has been implemented, and when combined with a handcrafted grammar, is used to enable a conversat...

Previous research in content planning for generation has tended to assume that content planning can be performed: by one monolithic planning process using intentional and rhetorical structures only by performing top-down planning to produce complete plans and then executing them These are signiicant simplifying assumptions that may work for text and monologic discourse, but fail to account for ...